Tag Archive for chocolate

I hope everyone is having a great 4th of July!! We decided to relax in the backyard mow, weed eat, edge, prune the roses, and weed the garden today. Of course, here in the Houston heat, the temperature is 95 degrees, but it feels more like 105. So after our hard work outside, we were in need of a nap and a cool treat.

What’s better then homemade ice cream sandwiches! Like my Grandma, I like to keep a couple of extra cookies in the freezer, just in case. Plus if they are out of sight, they are out of mind, right? Out of the freezer came the chocolate chip cookies and the ice cream. After the ice cream had softened, I put a scoop on the cookies and gently placed the other cookies on top. A word to the wise: don’t try to decorate them yet or else…you will get a huge ice cream mess, I speak from experience. I let the sandwiches firm up in the freezer a bit. Then I decorated them with red and blue stars, blue sugar and some red hots. Back into the freezer they went, for about 45 minutes to set.

What an easy and festive treat! Ice cream sandwiches are the perfect treat to cool you down on the hottest of days.

Like any normal grocery store visit, I had to go down the baking aisle. Who knows what new item I might discover. While picking up some semi-sweet chocolate chips, I noticed a bag of caramel bits; the kind that has the caramel in little balls (it’s sweet and gooey like the regular caramel). It reminded me that I had the exact same bag stashed away at home somewhere in my cluttered pantry.

As I was finishing my grocery shopping, I began brainstorming on how I could incorporate these golden little caramel balls. Then it occurred to me…chocolate and caramel is a favorite combo of mine, why not add it to my chocolate chip cookies and make a chocolate chip/caramel cookie. This couldn’t be a novel idea and I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before. To one-up the concept, I decided to add pecans to the mix to make a turtle sort of cookie. My certified in-house taste tester quickly gobbled down 3 cookies and said that they were “off the hook.” I agree!

It’s a super easy recipe. I made a batch of my chocolate chip cookie dough (I think any homemade dough should suffice). Add a ½ cup of caramel bits. Use more or less depending on your taste buds. To make the turtle cookies, I added 1/3 cup of pecans. I would have added more but it was all the pecans I had left in the house. Mix it all together by hand, bake to desired chewiness or crispiness and enjoy!!!

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I have just discovered Nutella!! I know…crazy right? It is a rich combination of chocolate and hazelnuts made into a spread. It is heaven in a jar. After giving my husband a spoonful, he suggested making it into a pie. Hmmm…could I really do this? Yes I can! I make a deliciously fluffy and smooth peanut butter pie (I call Peanut Butter Passion) so why couldn’t I just substitute the peanut butter for Nutella? Did it work? Of course it did. I decided to grind up some hazelnuts and put them in the chocolate cookie-like crust. I also decorated the top of the pie with homemade fudge sauce (which makes an excellent 2am bite of sweetness) and chopped hazelnuts. My husband tried it first and to say the least…he LOVED it. He still raves about it. Being allergic to certain nuts, I took a very small bite. To my pleasant surprise…I lived to tell about it. The pie is really the silkiest and smoothest pie I have ever had the pleasure of eating.